Working or Playing? » Practice

My Lunch with Melanie

Edward F. Gumnick — Thu, 08 Sep 2011 22:35:29 +0000

We met for lunch at Café Red Onion. She ordered the spinach and goat cheese enchiladas. I ate the usual pupusas revueltas—fat cornmeal pancakes stuffed with shredded pork and other good things.

We talked about writing. Since that topic encompasses everything else that we both live and breathe, the conversation covered a lot of ground.

She talked about inspiration and the nocturnal activities of her particular muse. There was a voice that came to her one night to dictate notes for years’ worth of writing projects. I speculated about the creative unconscious, the unknown workings of the mute machinery of our brains that collects, organizes, catalogs, and stores images, sounds, smells, emotions, and abstract ideas and then assembles them into dreams, long-term memories, and all the wonders of fantasy. I wondered why she was so eager to give the credit for her brilliance to something outside herself.

I told her about the lessons I was learning from helping other people figure out how not to hide their lights under bushels. She remarked that I seem to get better and better at giving advice without wasting a lot of time listening to what I’m saying.

I told her a long-winded story about losing weight and finding discipline, and of my endless quest to apply what I’d learned to my writing practice. Simple rules. Do something every day. Everything counts. And the new mantra that I’d picked up from a fitness podcast called Fat 2 Fit Radio—If you want to be fit, emulate the diet and habits of a fit person. Don’t promise you’ll eat better tomorrow or that you’ll go back to the gym next week.

There’s a broader lesson in that axiom, I think, for the writer, the artist, or anyone who aspires to do more, to be better, to claim his gift and follow its implications. When do you want it? Someday, or now? I gave her a homework assignment—write 400 words on the topic of our lunch date. She dared me to do the same. I carried the assignment home, took it for a seven-mile run around the park, and tucked it under my pillow when I went to bed. When the next work day was nearly done, I wrote this blog post. But I could have written only this:

Start living your life TODAY as the person that you ultimately want to be.

I Should Never Ever Take a Day Off

Edward F. Gumnick — Fri, 26 Mar 2010 16:58:16 +0000

Image: prozac1 / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

One of my daily routines—and a stated goal of my “projects” for the last four months—is to write at least 3,000 words per day. I started this practice almost two years ago. Usually, most of the 3,000 words are taken up by stream-of-consciousness blather, rants, and what I’d call verbal sketching—writing down what I might say if I were going to write about something in a serious manner.

Writing 3,000 words usually requires two periods of about 25 minutes each. I try to get through the first one before I do any other work each day and the second some time after dinner. Sometimes the “3,000-Word Initiative” (or 3kWI) exercises yield blog posts or letters to old friends, or occasionally business letters, proposals, and e-mail messages that I copy and paste when I’m finished with the exercise. Sometimes all I accomplish is to say what’s on my mind. I’ve described this function as “tapping off the crazy.” It’s often useful. Sometimes it’s also fun. Sometimes it’s painful, but I never regret having done it.

The last week has been challenging, though, with a weekend trip to Dallas and a heavier-than-normal workload. In the last seven days, I’ve written a first daily exercise six times, but I’ve only completed 3,000 words once. I did the best I could, but sometimes there just aren’t enough hours in the day. I plan to spend some extra time this weekend catching up on my blog-posting commitment and working my way back into the routine.

What always surprises me when I slack off on the 3kWI is how the quality of the experience changes. When I started writing this morning, my fingers felt clumsy on the keyboard, and the stream of consciousness was an intermittent trickle. I felt at a loss for ideas. I kept finding myself babbling about the lovely weather and worrying over all the tasks that remain on my to-do list. Creativity and inspiration were nowhere to be found.

They will return. They’ll surprise me some day soon, when I’ve put in enough practice.

Give Up the Game, or Change the Rules?

Edward F. Gumnick — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 05:46:07 +0000

Image: Salvatore Vuono / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

In some of her workshops, my friend and sometime coach Mattison Grey has offered a theory that everyone is about either fame, money, or winning, and that making this distinction can help you figure out how to help people get what they want.

I don’t know whether that idea holds water for everybody. I can’t speak for people who are about money or fame, and it seems to me that there might be all kinds of other things to be about—love, pleasure, or security, for instance. But as Mattison explained it to me, since my orientation is toward winning, the way for me to reach any goal I’ve set is to turn it into a game I can win. And that suggestion, at least, rings true for me.

That’s what I did in the early days of my current exercise regimen. I made it into a game with two simple rules:

Do something every day.

and

Everything counts.

As the years of everyday exercise have piled up, I’ve made the game more challenging with extra conditions and quotas. Right now, for example, I’m going twice around Memorial Park every day. I may not keep up that pace when the weather turns hot, but for now, that’s another rule I follow.

I’ve applied the “make a game of it” approach to other areas of my life, too. For most of the last two years, I’ve set a daily writing quota of 3,000 words. Sometimes I go for weeks at a time chalking up 3,000 words per day. Sometimes I don’t do so well. I’m better at walking than I am at writing, at least as far as the underlying discipline to practice is concerned.

In additional to maintaining some ongoing routines, I’ve also gotten in the habit of assigning myself special monthly projects in areas of life where I’d like to create some change. These projects are bigger games with more demanding rules. The March Project includes this objective (among others):

Post something to one of my blogs every day.

I was doing well until last Thursday, when I started having trouble with my laptop battery. It’s refusing to hold a charge for very long. To complicate matters, I had plans to spend the weekend in Galveston with friends. I took along my Windows laptop instead of my Mac. I completed my 3,000-word quota on two of the three days, but between the unfamiliar machine, spending the weekend in a house full of people, a lot of distractions, a few alcoholic beverages, and limited Internet connectivity, I didn’t manage to post anything to my blogs all weekend.

Should I give up at this point and call the March Project a loss? Until I hit the bump in the road, things were going great. I’d racked up 14 blog posts in 11 days, and that doesn’t include five short updates that could be counted if I were to adopt a very literal interpretation of “post something every day.”

No, I think I’d rather forget the weekend and look forward instead. so here’s a little trick to designing a game you can win: sometimes you have to change the rules in the middle of the game. I’m going to cut myself some slack and let my average of one post per day satisfy the terms of the March Project. Is that cheating? Maybe.

But the larger goal of posting something to one of my blogs every day was to demand more from my writing practice. And I’m not ready to quit that game.